Bring Out Your Dead

The class is also notable because it brings together two groups of students who rarely interact — undergraduates and graduate students enrolled in the university’s Master of Public Health program, where Drake is an assistant professor. With undergraduates enrolled in CONN 490 and graduate students enrolled in the equivalent course Public Health 624, this unique pairing allows the students to learn from each other’s experience and expertise while exposing undergraduates to one of Puget Sound’s highly regarded graduate programs and building community.

“Usually, the graduate programs are kind of siloed,” Drake says. “Not only does bringing these two student populations together strengthen those bonds across campus, it gives our undergrads a taste of what graduate-level education looks like and hopefully some of them will consider pursuing a master’s degree later on.”

As a Connections course in the university’s Grow Core Curriculum, the class is interdisciplinary in nature, encouraging students to find connections between disparate subjects. Each week, students gather to explore a different pandemic in chronological order, starting with the earliest recorded plagues and carrying through to the Black Death, the cholera epidemic, the Spanish Flu, and all the way to COVID-19.

In one session, students debated the impact of the 2009 H1N1 pandemic, commonly known as the swine flu. Rather than a lecture or typical classroom discussion, the students broke into groups and were assigned to take on the role of someone living through the outbreak, including government officials, pharmaceutical companies, livestock farmers, conspiracy theorists, and the media. 

The resulting debate uncovered many of the issues and controversies that dominated the headlines during that health crisis. Hands-on learning and critical thinking are baked into the course, with students leading classroom sessions. For one assignment, students were asked to put themselves into the shoes of a policymaker and suggest a public health policy to reduce the spread and impact of an outbreak. In another, students reenacted the dancing plague of 1518, when dozens of people literally danced themselves to death.

“Some of my favorite moments are seeing students make connections I hadn’t thought about. It’s a learning opportunity for me too,” Drake says. “Through the class, we see how the same factors influence the transmission of disease again and again: politics, economics, religion, and the influence of greed and colonization all play a role in public health.”

Over the course of the semester, students learn to understand the historical context of major epidemics and pandemics throughout human history; evaluate case studies to assess how past pandemics have informed modern public health and medicine; analyze the social, economic, and political implications of those outbreaks; and recognize that outbreaks can be examined through many disciplinary lenses.

At the end of the semester, students in CONN 490/PH 624 were assigned to design and present their own public health campaign on a past or present outbreak of their choice. They were encouraged to be creative with their messaging, which had to include an audio or visual component and took the form of public service announcements, video advertisements, Instagram reels, TikToks, podcasts, education posters, or magazine articles.

Drake is impressed by the creativity and thoughtfulness of her students, and thinks that some of them might be interested in pursuing a career in public health as a result of the class. Even if they don’t go into the field, she hopes they take away an understanding of why we must continue to invest in public health, especially at a time when federal spending on public health programs is under scrutiny.

“Public health doesn’t exist in a silo. Even if students aren’t pursuing it professionally, I want them to understand why supporting public health matters, because it impacts everyone,” Drake says.